'Jersey Shore': A vacation from good taste

Above: Geeks? Guidos? On the boardwalk, they'll switch targets in an instant.

If you’re the sort of high-minded, tender-hearted person who is deeply offended by ethnic humor, I imagine you probably don’t spend your summers in Seaside Heights.

Good thing. You wouldn’t make it halfway down the boardwalk before you’d be calling the p.c. police to shut down the T-shirt shops.

As for the actual Seaside Heights police, they have better things to worry about, such as keeping an eye on the cast of the MTV series "Jersey Shore." Last week the infamous "Snooki" Polizzi somehow managed to get herself arrested on charges of being drunk in a town dedicated to the struggle against sobriety.

I have never been able to sit through a single episode of "Jersey Shore" for one simple reason: When I was a kid, I used to get paid to watch such behavior. I’m certainly not going to do it for free.

During my years working boardwalk games, I saw every conceivable sort of stupid, rude, low-class, drunken act performed by the summer visitors known as "bennies" to the locals. Whenever I write about this, I find myself being denounced by some politically correct sort who informs me that I shouldn’t be using the term "bennie" because the word’s roots lie in some imaginary ethnic or racial slur.

I’ve never seen any proof of that. And there is even less proof that the term derives from Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark and New York or some such combination of place names. This is what etymologists call a "backcronym," similar to "Fix Or Repair Daily" for Ford cars or "Port Outward Starboard Home" as the origin of the word "posh."

Who thinks these things up? Wise guys like the boardwalk merchants trying to cash in on "Jersey Shore." If you’re offended by crass ethnic humor, please stop reading here.

Because in the next sentence I’m going to tell you about the T-shirt that offers this backronym for "guido" on the words running down its front: "Greased Up Italian Dancing Out-of-control."

Now that is truly tasteless. But I’m not sure it’s any worse than the new title the owners have given to what used to be the "Shoot the Geek" paintball game. Its new name is "Shoot the Guido."

The p.c. crowd would no doubt take offense, but the Arab-American guy named Mustafa collecting the cash didn’t mind.

"Do very many people walk up and defend guidos?" I asked him.

"Very few," Mustafa replied. In fact, he told me, several of the "Jersey Shore" cast members had come by to fire off a few paintballs at the "guido" — who is an actual human being wearing a paint-proof suit and helmet.

A tour of the T-shirt shops revealed further evidence that "guidoism" is a lifestyle choice rather than an ethnicity. The pro-guido camp was represented by shirts with slogans such as "Fist pumping like champs," a reference to the gesture employed by guidos when dancing. "Pump fists, not gas" was actually quite clever in alluding to Jersey’s status as one of two states without self-service.

On the antiguido side, there was the "Will Punch Snooki for Beer" T-shirt I saw on a guy drinking the $1.50 pints at the Beachcomber, where Pollizzi proved last summer that she can take a punch. In the shops, there were shirts bearing the slogan "Say no to guidoism" as well as several other antiguido sentiments.

Does this sort of thing bother you? Then spend your weekend in Ocean Grove. Earlier in the day, I had driven through that precious little community by the sea. Here’s what I noticed: Nothing. It was all so tasteful I can’t recall it.

Seaside’s the opposite. My only hope is that this show doesn’t ruin the place. Seaside is the last outpost of oceanfront seediness in Ocean County. Gentrification is inevitable. Already condos are replacing the ratty little bungalows that provided cheap digs for the drunken sots. Meanwhile the expansion of the boardwalk empire to the north that began in the 1970s has been beaten back. I saw a trendy-looking shop up there, and more will follow.

For the moment, though, Seaside remains a bastion of bad taste. And despite what all the uplifters and moralizers of the world believe, there is no force in all human history that has brought more people together than bad taste.

If you doubt that, just try and find a parking place in Seaside this weekend.